What a great day, very exciting and lots learnt from industry experts, with very little bias towards a vendor or specific technology. This post will form the first of two which is my attempt to mind dump some of the key takeaways I have picked up and found useful here at the conference.
BICC – Business Intelligence Competency Centre
Is dead… long live the ACE – Analytics Community of Excellence. In the keynote Neil Chandler suggested four things wrong with the BICC, business, intelligence, competency and centre! Although it is still the driver behind successful, versus non-successful, BI programs it is not encompassing enough of the modern world of BI and Analytics. Key benefits of this approach is an attempt to drive BI programs from business outcomes but mostly it fails and still becomes an efficiency drive, not linked to delivering actual business value. It also does not encompass a new wave of change in the business, self-service, which is near impossible to centrally manage. Finally it has not been driven around the new future of analytical applications which are focussed around algorithms and a scientific approach to running of businesses, and our lives!
Whilst there is a lot in words the evolution from BICC to ACE is not just about words it is about evolving and improving a good concept and bringing it up-to-date and inline with business needs. Analytics now seems to embrace BI and gives us a larger maturity scale for businesses in our ever changing world. Community takes away the need to centrally control and helps with the, already in-place, self-service. Finally excellence is about striving towards something we perceive as the ultimate goal, not just a list of competencies that are based around technology.
One thing that hasn’t changed but cannot be ignored is that you MUST FOCUS around BUSINESS OUTCOMES to achieve excellence in your BI or Analytics program.
Algortithms are KEY
An important key theme for the keynote centred around algorithms and their use in BI and Analytics as well as in day to day life. Guessing which classical piece of music was generated by a computer or Bach highlighted how compute power and science has progressed and there is a real feeling from Gartner that through the use of algorithms and the tools that support them we can automate, improve and gain valuable insight into our businesses. Algorithms are used all over your business today, take some time to document them and look to find tooling to support their automation and improvement. Citizen data science communities may spring up around this.
Other key notes:
- IoT algorithms are set to generate $15 billion by 2018
- Over half of organisations will be leveraging algorithms by 2018
- By 2020 50% of Analytics leaders will be able to link their programs to real business value.
- The best analytics leaders can formulate new questions as well as answer existing business ones. They also fail, learn and push the envelope; I would add they fail fast, time is gone for multi-year BI programs.
- Data Management and Data Integration tools are converging, but not as fast as you may imagine.
- BI and Analytics tools are also converging but it was noted NO one vendor can support all BI and Analytics needs and the buyers of each are currently different.
- Quadrant analysts highlight IBM’s Watson Analytics as a good example of an analytical application.
- Microsoft’s Power BI v1 (that horrible O365, SharePoint online linked tool) failed, but v2 has gained traction and is having a negative impact on Tableau’s performance.
Still a lot of learning to go, even on day 1 but I wanted to share this for those not fortunate enough to attend this amazing event!